It is common in the mobile radio telephone field to provide a radio telephone with a memory in which telephone numbers and other data can be stored. This memory, typically known simply as a phonebook, can store a telephone number (which may be manually entered or may be received in the form of a caller ID number or from a directory service) and a corresponding name or nickname which is typically entered manually by a user through a keypad. Phonebooks are becoming a very valuable resource to telephone users and greatly facilitate ease of usage, avoiding the need for paper lists, diaries and telephone directories.
As phonebooks grow in popularity and size, more and more effort is directed towards the ergonomic use of a phonebook. The ease of use of a telephone can be critical to the user's purchasing choice when choosing a telephone.
Most mobile phone users have a peer group with which they communicate. It is typical for a phonebook to store the telephone numbers and names of this group in alphabetical order or in some manually entered order. A problem with an alphabetical order of storing and presentation is that the phonebook becomes unwieldy when it grows to a long list of numbers. Mobile telephone generally have very small displays and are able to display only a few names at a time, so some scrolling mechanism is required to enable the user to jump to the particular section of the alphabetical list. Mobile telephones have very limited keypads (typically just 12 keys and some function keys), so it is not possible to enable a user to jump to a specific letter in the alphabet without requiring several key presses. It is a problem that phonebooks become filled with names and numbers of persons who need to be contacted only very infrequently alongside names and numbers of persons who need to be contacted on a much more frequent basis. Access to the latter group of numbers is hampered by the congested nature of the phonebook.
The manually ordered alternative, in which the user selects the first phonebook locations of his or her more popular numbers and lower order locations for less popular numbers is not convenient. The nature of telephone usage is that telephone numbers grow and decline in their relevance to the user, depending upon business being transacted. For example, if a user is selling a house, his or her agent's telephone number may become the most important number in the phonebook, but when the house is sold, that number may never be required again. It is typical to provide an incoming call register or an outgoing call register that logs the most recent incoming or outgoing calls (e.g. the last ten), and this is a useful feature for quickly accessing a number that is currently in high use, but these registers do not fulfil all the user's needs. For example, if the last ten outgoing calls have all been to the same number, the outgoing call register may be filled with just one number repeated ten times.
There is a need to provide telephone users with a more convenient mode of access to phonebook and other telephone numbers for dialing.